Archive (Page 1 of 3)

One of our ear­li­est com­mer­cial cus­tomers was a small start­up named Qualcomm. And we made some bold choic­es like pur­chas­ing equip­ment from anoth­er small start­up named Cisco and pro­vid­ed them with a big boost. We were 10% of their gross rev­enue for 1988, and they didn’t know how to ful­fill our order.

I’m very hap­py that I could par­tic­i­pate in this cer­e­mo­ny today for my father. To be hon­est, I grew up with­out know­ing much of his work. But this time I could know that there are many peo­ple who high­ly regard­ed his work and loved his char­ac­ter.

I stand here as a rep­re­sen­ta­tive of num­ber of groups of col­leagues. The work that was described was a part of what I did as part of the Indian aca­d­e­m­ic net­work project called the Education & Research Network, ERNET, fund­ed by the gov­ern­ment of India and sup­port­ed by the United Nations Development Programme.

I would like to say that I was born know­ing I was going to be design­ing pro­to­cols. But in fact, if I’d known more about com­put­ers when I was young, I would have said I would be hap­py doing pret­ty much any­thing as long as it didn’t involve com­put­ers.

My love affair with com­put­ing, which became after awhile a love affair with net­work­ing, began in the mid­dle 60s when I was a grad­u­ate stu­dent in busi­ness at Stanford. And some­one said, ​“You know, there’s some­thing going on on the west side of cam­pus hav­ing to do with com­put­ers.”

I spent the first half, let’s say fif­teen years of a career, try­ing to make com­mu­ni­ca­tions eas­i­er. And I thought that was a cool thing; I thought that would be great. I’ve spent rough­ly the sec­ond half, anoth­er fif­teen years, try­ing to make com­mu­ni­ca­tion hard­er, or at least more selec­tive and safer

I did not invent an impor­tant thing. I am not an inno­va­tor. The only thing I did is you know, in ear­ly 2000, when WiFi was just com­ing I used a sim­ple indoor router to make a long‐range wire­less link, a forty‐kilometer link, to bring Internet in my home vil­lage.

Thanks goes to every­body who helped to spread the tech­nol­o­gy. Okay, no. There’s one guy I won’t thank, and that’s the one who used a stolen cred­it card num­ber to buy our soft­ware and then spread it claim­ing it’s free. He did help us, but still I don’t thank him.

In view­ing the list of pre­vi­ous and cur­rent inductees, one is awestruck just to be includ­ed among them. My own con­tri­bu­tions in broad­band access, par­tic­u­lar­ly DSL, seem some­what dwarfed by those of the oth­ers.